Martin Berg

So it turns out that Beyonce’s ardent, flawless performance of the Star-Spangled Banner may have been lip-synced. The more important and far trickier question is whether President Obama’s impassioned promise to fight for the middle class and a just society is for real, or just more lip service. The president

We know which Barack Obama won reelection Tuesday night. The question is: which one woke up and went to work Wednesday morning? Was it the passive Obama who, after winning a stirring, historic victory in 2008, allowed the insurgent tea party to inaccurately redefine his affordable health care plan as

If Mitt Romney’s high-finance cronies had more money invested in horses and bayonets, would the Republican presidential candidate be insisting that our national security depended on them? As it is, Romney is championing a vast and costly expansion in the number of the Navy’s big battleships, from which one of his top

OK, so Paul Ryan’s budget numbers don’t add up. But there’s another critical bit of arithmetic that has been working just fine for him, though you won’t read anything about it in the lengthy New York Times magazine profile now available on the newspaper’s web site. Ryan is portrayed as

As a snapshot of the wildly dysfunctional state of our political union, last night’s festivities were a smashing success. All sides were serving up plenty of mom, apple pie and platitudes while ignoring what’s actually left on plates of millions of Americans – nothing. I did find at least something

Everybody wants to claim a piece of the spirit of Martin Luther King in support of his or her cause. A Pentagon official even had the nerve to say King, who championed nonviolence, would have supported U.S. wars in Afghanistan. That’s an especially dubious assertion given that the civil rights